FirstHealth of the Carolinas Inc. began replacing its film-based radiological technology with an online digital capture and storage/retrieval system in late 2005 to enable up to 300 of its radiologists and physicians to instantly access clinical images from any location, says Linda Briggs, director of application support.
But project leaders such as CIO David Dillehunt envisioned much more.
“We wanted to take a broad approach to this — not just for our three hospitals, but also as a community repository of radiological and other images” for health care organizations outside of the FirstHealth network, says Dillehunt. This includes Pinehurst (N.C.) Medical Clinic Inc., a 55-physician facility that’s separately owned and operated.
But before the so-called picture archiving and communication system (PACS) project could accomplish these goals, FirstHealth faced a high technological hurdle in trying to synchronize the clinical systems used by its three hospitals and other clinics for patient identification purposes, says Dillehunt.
FirstHealth’s IT organization attacked those challenges by applying a combination of technologies, including McKesson Corp.’s Horizon Passport system. The Web-based enterprise master patient index is used to help coordinate medical records across the organization, Dillehunt says.
In addition, FirstHealth technical analysts built software interfaces and workflow processes into the clinical applications used at its hospitals and associated clinics. Although that multilateral approach worked well, Dillehunt says continuing efforts to keep patient ID data harmonized “requires constant monitoring.”
“It speaks to the challenges of building RHIOs,” says Dillehunt. Regional Health Information Organizations are aimed at integrating clinical and patient record systems among hospitals and clinics within a geographic area.
PACS Pays off
PACS, which went live in March 2006, is providing FirstHealth with several clinical and IT-related benefits. For starters, FirstHealth has been wrestling with year-over-year data growth of 100% since 2004. With a mix of more than 650 applications to manage, the organization saw a digital storage architecture as a means to increase its operational efficiencies, reduce costs and improve patient care.
The digital imaging system has also enabled FirstHealth to slash its annual film budget from around US$800,000 to about $50,000 this year, says Mike McCarty, FirstHealth’s director of imaging.
The PACS system relies heavily on storage and networking software from NetApp Inc. NetApp NearStore systems enable high-speed, disk-to-disk backup while serving as a permanent archive for the PACS images. NetApp SnapMirror software works with NetApp Snapshot technology to replicate all critical business and patient data among FirstHealth’s three hospitals. Meanwhile, NetApp FlexVol storage virtualization software dynamically provisions and reallocates the organization’s storage resources as needed.
Real-time access to patient information has helped improve the quality of patient care by enabling FirstHealth physicians to make faster decisions about treatment, says Drusi Smith, a senior clinical analyst at the organization. That in turn is helping FirstHealth reduce the length of patient stays in its hospitals, Smith says.
FirstHealth is also providing storage access and other services to Pinehurst Medical and other clinics. As part of those services, FirstHealth stores clinical data for the health care organizations that they can access online, says Smith.
But as a not-for-profit, FirstHealth isn’t in it for the money, says Dillehunt. “We’re basically just covering our costs,” he says. “This is more of a quality initiative.”
